TERROR IN THE PYRENEES: RELIGION, REVOLUTION AND THE NATION IN SOUTHWESTERN FRANCE, 1789-1794

Abstract

This dissertation examines the ways in which revolutionaries in France used religion to define concepts of citizenship, belonging, and identity between the years 1789 and 1794. It contends that the religious policies of the Terror (1793-1794), which it terms the “Sacerdotal Revolution,” were an attempt to construct a new imagined national religious community centered on the worship of the Supreme Being and the nation. It demonstrates that at the beginning of the eighteenth-century, French society was divided between two mutually complementary spheres of authority: the temporal realm of kings and the spiritual realm of Church. Over the course of the century, political and religious writers put forward arguments that essentially integrated spiritual institutions into the terrestrial world, thus paving the way for the formation of a national religious community embodied in the Constitutional Catholic Church of 1791. However, the failure the Constitutional Catholic Church to provide national religious consensus and the looming threat of war, polarized and politicized identities inside and outside the French Republic, and led some revolutionaries during the Terror to embrace a type of universal patriotic religion predicated upon an exclusionary national identity. As this dissertation maintains, at the heart of the debate over religion during the French Revolution was a tension between universalism and particularism, and the ways in which diverse religious and ethnic identities were able to relate to the universal category of French citizenship. This tension was most acute in the southwestern borderlands of France, which were characterized by ethnic and religious diversity. As a result, all those who fell outside the boundaries of the universal patriotic religion of the Sacerdotal Revolution were considered counterrevolutionary religious fanatics in need of regeneration. At the same time, the universalist discourse of the Sacerdotal Revolution also offered some ethno-religious minorities a chance to exercise their citizenship. Thus, by studying the religious debates of the French Revolution, this dissertation seeks to show how revolutionaries in southwestern France attempted to construct a new imagined religious community during a moment of religious conflict, political factionalism, and war.